22. Delphine
It was notthe first time I’d found myself in that swimming, deep darkness.
It was an endless void of a black so much deeper than night that it seemed to consume me to the very core, to the inner depths of me that light had never before reached. All at once it both pressed in from all sides and pulled me apart in every direction until I was in danger of being turned into the bare essence of whatever it was that made me up.
I was not just deaf and blind, but void of touch, too. I was aware of my own existence, but only in theory. I couldn’t feel my own body, couldn’t feel the brush of my fingers against the surface of my skin, couldn’t feel the strands of my hair tickle the back of my neck. I both existed and didn’t at the same time.
I was in a place where nothing could reach me, not the fae that had been pulled in here with me, not myself, not even the glamour. I couldn’t sense it here, couldn’t sense anything except my own withering soul.
I was alone in that darkness for both an eternity and nothing more than the span of a heartbeat.
I had no idea how much time passed in The Endless before I heard it. It started out so quiet, I thought I didn’t hear it at all—that it was nothing more than proof of my own impending descent into madness. It was soft, melodic, like the rhythmic trickle of water bubbling between the time-worn rocks of an ancient brook.
It grew slowly, so slowly I didn’t hear the moment it transitioned from a whisper to a word. In that moment, suddenly, I was no longer alone.
In a flash, a single instant, I existed again.
I was no longer a bodiless entity trapped in that darkness; I was myself. I couldn’t see myself, couldn’t feel myself, still, but something had changed. The darkness was not quite so dark the moment she arrived.
I only called this being a she from the sound of her voice. I couldn’t see her, only sense her presence.
Though presence was not the right way to describe it, not when it was so much more than that.
There was only one other way to describe it, and even then, it had been a shadow of what I felt before me now. I knew from the last time I’d been in Tethys’ presence, what it was I felt, what it was that existed now in The Endless with me.
I was in the presence of a god.
“Fear not, high king,” her voice broke through the endless silence, “your destiny does not end here, even if fate would have it so.”
Even if fate would have it so.
Her words struck at something deep-rooted in me, at the belief I’d held that fate was on my side, not against it. When I’d first come to faerie, I hadn’t believed in fate, but as I’d seen my life unravel, seen the world descend into chaos as I still somehow survived, I’d begun to believe differently.
But I’d never imagined that fate was against me, never imagined that the unraveling I’d seen might be because I’d survived. That fate had designated a different path for the realms, one that I fought against as surely as I did the other high kings.
Not, at least, until the end of that last battle. I’d started to have an inkling then, but it was only that.
I opened my mouth to respond, but found no air in my lungs to speak.
“You were plucked from your human life for a purpose, Delphine,” the god continued, “That purpose has not changed, it is the same now as it was when you first stepped foot in faerie. Some are born into these realms to live; you are not one of them.”
Her words should have struck fear into me, anguish, loss…something other than the deep knowing that it did.
“Fate has set the price for the future of Avarath, and you are that price, Delphine.”
What might have once turned my blood to ice simply settled in me with a heavy truth. I think I’d known it for a long time, been trying to convince myself that the reason I was still alive was because fate had willed it so, not because I’d been conspiring so long against it. Seren had been the first to do it, to reach outside of time and space in the Pool of Indecision and plot to work against fate. But then the rest had followed suit, and it had brought us here. Our paths were lined with destruction, with death, with betrayal and heartbreak.
At every turn, we’d been met with resistance.
And now it made sense why.
Fate had not been on our side all of this time. We had been actively fighting against it.
As if reading my thoughts, the god’s voice grew more soothing.
“And yet, you were never alone,” she said. “Fate might not have been on your side, but there are just as great forces in play that are. You are the future of all realms, so choose your path carefully. When the time comes, seek me, and you will find your way past fate yet again.”
I felt her presence begin to fade into The Endless, but even as it did, I felt myself shift in the other direction. I became more solid, my body forming again, and with it that pressing and expanding grew, too. I began to reject The Endless that had been consuming me.
I felt my lungs begin to scream for lack of oxygen, and still I tried to use the last whisper of a breath to ask the god what she meant, to ask for more, for something, but no sound came out of me. I tried to breathe, tried to draw in air, but there was no air to be drawn. I went from disappearing in the void to drowning in it.
I didn’t know what was worse, the endless nothing, or the feeling of actually dying.
One was empty, one was only pain.
That pain grew and grew, the silence broken again only by my own choking. The first thing I’d seen since entering that darkness was the moment light bloomed behind my eyelids, the last dying spark of life before I left whatever this world was and entered the next or simply ceased to exist.
Only, it wasn’t.
What I thought was a spark behind my eyelids was the beginning of something else. It started as a mere spot of light, fleeting, and then it grew. It glittered like a distant star, uncertain at first, before it suddenly exploded with light, blinding me as every other sense was overwhelmed, too.
It was not like the first time I’d been lost in The Endless, slipping away without a tether between two pools. This was different.
I exploded back into existence from nothingness, the last fragments of me that had held on reforming me anew as I stumbled out into a new world, a new realm, into a place that was altogether unexpected and all too familiar.
I didn’t know which had brought me here, fate or the destiny the gods had lined up for me, but once again, I found myself standing in the human court of Alderia. But this time, as Lord Gayge looked down at me from a throne he had no right to sit on, I was no longer powerless.